Fishy, Fishy!

Mike with a Silver salmon at First Hole

Every year, the salmon begin making their way back to the streams of their birth.  They will fight the good fight to get up that stream, regardless of the obstacles, so that they can spawn and bring new little salmon into the world.  As this process begins, their bodies also begin to change.  Their bodies will start to change color with the meat getting softer with the color progression.  When they have spawned, they die.  It's not a quick death, though.  They really start to decay before they die.  I've seen salmon that were completely white with flesh soft enough it looks ready to start falling off the bone and still very slowly swimming around.  It seems like a very sad, cruel circle of life.

Me holding one fillet from that salmon

The salmon typically begin coming up the creek in June and will continue through October.  The creeks have been very full of salmon for a while and they are now starting to die in pretty big numbers.  Their smell makes trips up the valley a little less pleasant this time of year, but the bears seem to like it anyway.  With there only being the two if us, it didn't take a lot of fishing to get our winter's worth of fish for the freezer.  The fact that they will die pretty quickly anyway does make me feel a little better about taking them out of that cruel circle of life, but not enough to keep me from making an idiot out of myself.  We were down at the lagoon on low tide when I saw a beautiful male red salmon struggling to get upstream in water that was only a couple inches deep.  He didn't appreciate my efforts to help and fought me the entire way, but I scooped him up and carried him across a good sized stretch of dry land to get to a deeper fork in the stream.  I then held him upright in the water until he regained the energy to keep himself straight in the stream.  I'm sure the local guys fishing out of their canoes in the lagoon were shaking their heads at what they saw, but that's okay.  That fish may only have a few days left in him, but I did what I could to make them the best they could be.  Mike is still trying to decide whether or not he should claim me.

Salmon swimming upstream

They just keep coming